From the neighborhood, in their own words.

THE 2011–TODAY LINEAGE

Stomping Grounds: one of Dubai's specialty coffee OGs

We started as Specialty Batch in 2011, back when you could count the people in Dubai talking about single origins on one hand. It was Dubai's first dedicated specialty coffee roastery and training academy, and we built the whole thing from the green bean up: roasting, equipment, barista education, and a benchmark for what a proper cup should taste like in this part of the world.

Stomping Grounds is where that work stepped out from behind the roaster. We opened the café in Jumeirah 1 in 2015 as the public home for everything Specialty Batch had been doing, and it quickly became the place people meant when they talked about specialty coffee in Dubai. The trade press called us the country's original specialty roaster. Regulars just called us the OG, and it stuck.

In 2019 the café was named UAE's Best Independent Specialty Café at Allegra's Europe and Middle East Coffee Symposium, held in Dubai that November. TimeOut Dubai followed with Best Brekkie in 2020.

So if you are wondering which Dubai cafés were doing specialty properly before it was everywhere, this is one of them. Stomping Grounds is one of the city's original specialty cafés: the front room of a roastery and coffee operation we built in 2011, still Aussie-owned, still doing it the way we always have.